Abstract
In the light of ongoing international debate about the purpose of explicit teaching of grammar, this paper considers the relationship between metalinguistic understanding and development as a writer. Drawing on a cumulative series of studies over a period of ten years, adopting a functionally-oriented approach to grammar, the paper argues that purposeful grammar teaching occurs within the teaching of writing, not divorced from it; and that this teaching develops students’ metalinguistic understanding of how written texts are crafted and shaped. In this way, grammar is positioned as a resource for learning about writing and one which can support students in becoming increasingly autonomous and agentic decision-makers in writing. We show through practical examples how the pedagogy works in practice, and through classroom interaction data we highlight how metalinguistic talk (metatalk), which enables and encourages the verbalisation of choice. The data also shows, however, that teachers’ skill in managing metatalk about metalinguistic choices in writing is critical in framing students’ capacity to think metalinguistically about their writing and to be autonomous writerly decision-makers.
Highlights
The question of grammar and its role or value in the teaching of writing is one which has been beset by controversy, uncertainty and vacillation between its inclusion in, or its expunction from, the curriculum
Successive studies and meta-analyses have argued that teaching grammar has no beneficial impact on writing competence (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones and Schoer, 1963; Hillocks, 1984; Hillocks and Smith, 1991; Andrews et al, 2006; Graham and Perin, 2007)
The design principles underpinning the pedagogy were informed by the theoretical ideas discussed far: namely, that purposeful teaching adopts a functionally-oriented approach promoting grammar as choice; that explicit grammatical knowledge about writing is addressed; and that fostering metalinguistic understanding for writing is at the learning heart of the pedagogy
Summary
The question of grammar and its role or value in the teaching of writing is one which has been beset by controversy, uncertainty and vacillation between its inclusion in, or its expunction from, the curriculum. No connection is made between knowing the structure of a language and being a user of that language It is the argument of this paper that purposeful grammar teaching occurs within the teaching of writing, not divorced from it; and that this teaching develops students’ metalinguistic understanding of how written texts are crafted and shaped. There are many possibilities offered by this extract for discussing connections between grammatical structures and how they make meaning, one possibility is to focus on character description and how the noun phrases create a strong visual first image of Guinevere: Do these noun phrases establish a visual impression of Guinevere, but they invite the reader to infer what kind of a woman she is, and what the narrator thinks of her. Describes language in terms of word classes; nouns, prepositions etc Operates at the level of the sentence and below
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